Powell was the eldest child of Louis Powell, a businessman, and Mary Gwaltney Powell. Educated at McGuire’s University School, a private academy that prepared students for admission to the University of Virginia, Powell instead attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., where he was elected student body president and received bachelor’s (1929) and law (1931) degrees. He then earned a master’s degree in law from the Harvard Law School in 1932 and joined a Richmond law firm that same year. In 1935 he moved to a more prestigious Richmond law firm, where he was made a partner in 1938.

Powell volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, serving in both combat and intelligence positions. After the war he renewed his law practice and served in several civic posts. As chairman of the public school board in Richmond (1952–61), he began the process of integrating the schools—emerging as a conservative opponent of politicians who endorsed “massive resistance” to avoid integration—while other school districts in Virginia were experiencing bitter disputes. He also served on the state board of education (1961–69), including a term as president in 1968–69, and as president of the American Bar Association from 1964 to 1965.

Widely respected in legal circles, the thoughtful, pragmatic, and conciliatory Powell was nominated in October 1971 by Pres. Richard M. Nixon to fill the seat on the Supreme Court being vacated by JusticeHugo L. Black. He was easily confirmed (89–1) by the Senate on Dec. 6, 1971, and he took his seat on the court in January 1972. Powell was one of the more conservative members of the court during the 1970s and early ’80s, but he came to occupy a key centrist position as Pres. Ronald Reagan’s appointments shifted the court’s composition in a conservative direction. Powell took a moderate-to-liberal stance on such issues as legalized abortion (e.g., he supported abortion rights in Roe
v. Wade [1973] but also later endorsed a Missouri law that required minors to receive parental consent when seeking an abortion and ruled that states did not have to fund abortions for poor women), separation of church and state, and civil rights questions, but he was basically a conservative on matters of crime and law enforcement. He also voted with the majority in Bowers
v. Hardwick (1986) to uphold Georgia’s prohibition against sodomy (though he wrote that severe punishment might violate the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause). Among his most well-known decisions was Regents of the University of California
v. Bakke (1978), in which Powell led the court in ruling that affirmative action was constitutional as a mechanism to achieve diversity, though the court rejected the use of strict numerical quotas as a means to that end.

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(1907-98). U.S. lawyer and civic leader Lewis Powell was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1972 to 1987. Widely respected in legal circles, Powell took a moderate-to-liberal stance on such issues as separation of church and state and civil rights questions, but he was basically a conservative on matters of crime and law enforcement.